I recently won an AWS IoT Button through a competition in my work. I’m not 100% sure what I’ll do with it as yet but it seems like a pretty cool device and a really intuitive way for anyone to get involved with the internet of things. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that due to it being a Amazon product, it’s tied to AWS (Amazon Web Services) so you’ll have to create an account with them and use their services to handle the programming and integrations that the button will use. I’ve used AWS for approximately 3 years now and I love the capabilities that their services provide to developers, so I’m very excited to get using the IoT Button.

One sad drawback I’ve discovered is the battery cannot be replaced. It’s been soldered inside which would make fitting replacements reasonably difficult to a hardware novice like myself. However, Amazon predict you can get approximately one thousand pushes (and maybe a few more) of the button before the internal battery runs it’s course. So I’m currently trying to think of a few good use cases for how I could make use of it.

Burritos on demand

Since I work in Belfast and love burritos from Boojum, my current idea would be to implement an integration that when I push the button, a request is sent to Deliveroo for a burrito from Boojum’s central restaurant with the delivery address set to my office. I’m not sure how feasible this would be but it’s probably going to be something I’ll try and implement in the not so distant future.

I’ll be sure to write a follow-up post in the coming weeks to explain what idea I decided on and if my burritos on demand concept ever developed into anything more than a gluttonous dream.

-Andrew